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- [00:00]
A
A show. It is another day that ends in Y and Donald Trump's assault on American democracy, as Ronald Reagan once put it. There he goes again. Trump again tried to attack America's election systems, but he failed miserably. He presented no evidence of votes switched in the 2020 election. Let's discuss with Michigan Democratic Senator Alyssa Slotkin. Senator, thanks so much for being with us.
- [00:23]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:24]
A
Hey, really appreciate you coming back on. I guess, first of all, I mean, we should just, you know, point out the New York Times and others have summed this up pretty well. No evidence of votes switched. This is how they put it. For years, Trump has offered a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and baseless charges to support his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that America's election system was hijacked by a combination of outside powers and deep state insiders. But when he declassified a raft of intelligence reports, hastily drafted emails between officials at the FBI and other agencies, and formal assessments late Thursday, he was unable to prove his case. I mean, I think that's putting it mildly. What? What did you think?
- [01:05]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, again, like a kind of another chapter in this book that he is writing ahead of the November elections that, you know, enables him to say, look, the elections aren't legitimate. I didn't lose badly. People aren't unhappy with me. And he. He did all the sort of election stuff on the back end of all his economy stuff, kind of talking to the American people like they're stupid. Right. Like they don't know that gas prices are up. Like they don't know that, you know, every cost in their life has gone up. And, and I think it just, you know, I. If you take a step back, because we're all so used to the craziness of Trump to the point where people sort of roll their eyes now with his drama. If you take a step back and just think what it means to do a primetime address where you completely distort reality on the economy and then lay the predicate for invalidating elections in November. I mean, it is really an authoritarian playbook we've seen all over the world many, many times that he is reading from.
- [02:08]
A
Yeah. And he presented no new evidence of really anything. I mean, that would pertain to, you know, an election being stolen from him, which is what he's complained about for years and years. I mean, I think we have some of the documents from the White House website. They put these documents up last night, and some of these were intelligence assessments. And I mean, I, I was under the heading Russia. There was just a whole bunch of redactions, which I thought was very interesting. You know, it sort of looks like the Epstein files, but on a different page. It, it says, we assess that Russia is using a range of measures primarily to denigrate former Vice President Joe Biden in what it sees as an anti Russia establishment. You know, so some, at certain points, they sort of proved the opposite. That, you know, there was, yeah, there was an effort to help Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
- [02:59]
B
Yeah. And I think, I mean, it seems like 100 years ago, but if you remember the Mueller report, which I'm sure you covered in detail. Right. So this was a former director of the FBI, a very respected senior official in our country, who took a hard look at Russian influence in the 2016 election when Donald Trump won. And it basically said that they tried to, you know, they wanted Trump to win, but the effectiveness of what they did was mixed. And, you know, so it was there, but it wasn't, like, definitive. And Trump just trashed the living hell out of the Mueller report. Right. Anything that would talk about foreign influence in an election he won, he's going to trash. But foreign influence on election, he's going to lose. No. Then he's going to go high and. Right. And I think part of that authoritarian playbook that we've seen played out is creating the security problem that only Donald Trump or only the authoritarian can fix. And this is where I really think what happened last night portends something kind of much darker, which is the possibility of sending uniform military or federal law enforcement around our polls on election day or to collect ballots or voting machines. And he won't rule it out. And we've. The playbook is the, the sort of everything pressurizes right before the election. And then the, the President says, we've got a terrible security incident. We've got foreign influence going on, and only I can say, save us by sending in the military. That's for intimidation. That's to skew the results, collect, you know, ballots potentially. And I think that's the kind of thing we've been doing tabletop exercises and kind of really thinking through what happens if we have uniforms sent out on behalf of the President to influence the voting.
- [04:50]
A
Yeah, I guess. And that leads me to my next question, which is what does happen? I mean, I, I suppose you can propose legislation that says, you can't do this, you can't do that. He's not going to sign that legislation into law. I mean, should, should Democrats say, listen, if you try to do this, when we take over, you will be impeached. We will, we will mount an effort to remove you from office. I mean, what, what, what should be put out there as the deterrent to this behavior?
- [05:15]
B
Yeah, well, first of all, it, it is really incumbent on the, the, the states, excuse me, that are really going to be targeted to have laid out a bunch of plans ahead of time to think through this. So Michigan is one of those states. He called out Michigan yesterday again in his talk. So I'm having meetings with senior officials, elected officials and otherwise in the state. Like, what happens, you know, he's mentioned Detroit a ton. What happens if he sends uniform, military or federal law enforcement to counting locations in the city of Detroit? What kind of legal documents do we have to have ready to go so that we can stop that activity so that we can make sure he does? You know, if they take, if they touch voting machines or ballots, which is illegal, by the way, it invalidates. It breaks the chain of custody on those votes and can invalidate those votes. Right. So how do we have all of our legal ducks in a row? How do we know, like, the moves that we're going to take if they go ahead and do such a major thing is send in those troops? What do the local police do? Right. Security incident at a poll, that's when you call the local police. Right. We know that there's incidents at polls. You can have rowdy people, disruptive people. Why do we need to send federal troops, federal law enforcement? So how do we make sure our police forces are ready to respond if there is a security incident? But a lot of it is about knowing ahead of time. You know, what do you do if you're running a polling location and someone comes and demands access, but they don't have a warrant? You know, what is your next three calls? Those kinds of preparedness things are what we're really emphasizing back home in Michigan.
- [06:55]
A
And I. So I guess this, this may end up going to the court. She may end up having to go to judges and saying that night we need a restraining order against ice. We can't have them at this polling location. I mean, but then that sort of presents the scenario where you could have federal agents, you know, squaring off with local law enforcement. That, that is a scary, that's a scary scenario.
- [07:18]
B
You get into some really scary sort of historic, historically bad scenarios. And, you know, I've raised this with Mark Wayne Mullen. I've raised this with the Secretary of Defense. I've raised this with every cabinet official I can that you will be the person getting the call saying, okay, go deploy those troops. The president had an executive order back in 2020 that he didn't sign and he now says he regrets he didn't sign it. That said, you need to go uniform military needs to go into the state of Michigan and come collect ballots. Right. So that we can handle and correctly count what happened in the state of Michigan. He said in January he wished he had signed that. This is not make believe. This is not hypothetical at this point. So I, it, it is really exactly what you say. What do the, you know, Detroit police do if ICE comes to the counting location in Detroit? These are some really high stakes scenarios.
- [08:15]
C
Yeah.
- [08:15]
A
And Trump has showed, you know, no qualms about bringing in the intelligence community into all this. The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, you know, of course, she was part of that effort to seize ballots in Georgia. And now he, now he has somebody who is just a rank amateur, Bill Pulte, as the Acting Director of National Intelligence. And you have been talking about legislation to ensure that intelligence leaders have. Well, it would be nice if they had intelligence, but actual national security experience. Can you talk about that?
- [08:45]
B
Sure. So it's interesting when, when the, create the, they created the, the Director of National Intelligence job, it was in the wake of a massive intelligence failure around 9, 11. Right. Congress created the position and actually it was Susan Collins who wrote into the legislation for the dni, that the, the DNI must be someone with national security experience. I haven't talked to her about it, but way back 20 plus years ago, she, she put that in there. But they didn't say anything about anyone who would be the Acting Director of National Intelligence. So Bill Pulte is now sitting in that position. He's never had a security clearance, he's never handled classified information. He's never had to make a national security decision ever. And he's in charge of 18 different intelligence community agencies in the United States right now. So I dropped a bill that said, okay, I'm just going to take Susan Collins language and say if it's good enough to be the confirmed Director of National Intelligence, you got to have experience. Let's also say that for the Acting Director of National Intelligence, anyone who's just got that power, even if it's just for a few weeks, the intelligence community does incredible things every day to protect us in the dead of night. But it also means they have very powerful tools, very capable personnel that if Turned on the American people if used for the wrong purposes, sends us down a dark, dark hole that no American wants us in. So I, I think that was the legislation we dropped yesterday. And again, the President was clear. He put Bill Pulte in the job to look at the 2020 election and try to re litigate his loss in 2020. He's open about it. Like, we don't have to guess with this man.
- [10:27]
A
Yeah, no, there's no question about it. And I mean, you know, he has had other people with, you know, scant national security and intelligence experience. Rick Renell was the acting DNI at one point. And you know, I, to me, I, it seems as though he could just keep doing this. And he does have a nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He can't even answer the question whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. So, I mean, I mean, he, there seems to be a litmus test for people in these roles.
- [11:00]
B
Yeah, it's really been, it's incredible. There's a few questions that if you ask all the Trump nominees, they kind of squirm in their seat, bury their own conscience and, you know, sort of their own brains and repeat what their dear leader has told them to say. And that is that they cannot say on the stand, on the dais, they cannot say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because they've got one viewer that they're trying to impress, one guy who's watching, you know, whatever C SPAN or, and watching them in their hearings. And it's just, it's one of those things you just have to wonder, you know, I'm an elected official, how do you look yourself in the mirror? I mean, you know, we politicians all do things to, you know, talking points or whatever, but at the end of the day, you still got to like go home and kind of look yourself in the mirror and say, am I, am I kind of living up to the values that I was raised in and that my country was, was sort of brought up in? And a smart person who was a U.S. attorney can't say that Joe Biden won the election in 2020. Something like my 12 year old nephew can say is really just, I think, a new level of humiliation and just an example of kind of when the emperor has no clothes, it really takes all these other people to, to maintain it. And that's what I heard from Clayton yesterday.
- [12:27]
A
Yeah, I know there's a lot of important stuff going on, but I have to ask you because you're on Armed Services. I have to ask you about this beach flyover. I'm sure you saw the video of this where the Blue Angels did this incredibly low flyover on the beach, and all these beachgoers were startled. I just, you know, not to throw something out of left field at you here, but, I mean, the. Apparently the. The Navy Secretary saying, no, there's not going to be any kind of disciplinary action here. That I just thought that was really scary and reckless. I don't know what you thought, and forgive me for asking, something completely out of left field, right field, whatever. Whatever it is on the beach. I don't know. I think it was left to right. But what do you think of that?
- [13:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, I think the clearest thing I can say is that leadership climate is set from the top. And the way this president and this Secretary of Defense have really brought this, like, intense machismo, testosterone literally into, like, to make it. You know, that's how you're a real man. That's how you're a really impressive guy. When the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of Defense are. Are acting that way, it. We shouldn't be surprised when that filters down to folks on the ground. And so I have no idea about this flyover. I have no idea the guidance from anybody and whether that certainly looked too close. I've never seen something that close. But, you know, when everyone gets in this, like, rah, rah, like, I'm a tough guy. I've got to show off. We shouldn't be surprised when that plays out in something like a military parade or a demonstration. So I don't know about this whole thing, but, you know, I think I worked alongside the military my entire career. And, you know, the. There are. There are no. There's no force in the world that's more capable, more disciplined, more serious. And, like, when you have to be bragging about your testosterone levels and, like, beating your chest, you know, everyone kind of identifies, like, that's the dude who's actually self conscious and worried about his manhood. Not. Not the guy who really knows that, like, to be a cutthroat, serious soldier, you're disciplined, serious kind of talk, speak quietly, and carry a big stick is the way I know the military. The guys in the military I worked with.
- [14:50]
A
That's not what Pete Hex does.
- [14:51]
B
Yeah, that's not his thing.
- [14:53]
A
Yeah, yeah, he t. He's into this testosterone thing now, and he's doing bench presses all the time. And it's. It's a little strange. It's a little strange.
- [15:02]
B
I mean, again, the most serious guys I met, you know, the Navy seals and the Rangers and the guys who were Delta, top of their, top of their field, were the quiet guys sitting there, serious, disciplined leaders of men and women, not the guys like in the corner beating their chest, bragging about how much they could bench press.
- [15:22]
A
Yeah, those are the guys you don't mess with, that's for sure. Senator Slotkin, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it and hope to have you back soon.
- [15:29]
B
Thanks so much.
- [15:30]
A
Want to remind everybody again that we've got this great new newsletter that's out. It's out on both substack and YouTube. So for our paid subscribers out there, it is a real gem. It's written by our new writer and senior content director, Tommy Christopher, and really invite everybody to take a look at that as well. Let's stay on, though. Trump's dangerous dictator speech from last night, it was totally deranged and it was filled with conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, many of which have been recycled over and over again and debunked. Let's talk about this with one of the best election experts in the country right now. It's David Bechter. He's the executive director. David, tell us the name of your organization, because it's. I had a opportunity to be with you all at an event recently, and it was such a terrific event. People need to know more about your organization.
- [16:22]
C
Oh, thank you so much, Jim. And thanks for having me on. Really glad you could be there for the event.
- [16:27]
A
Yeah.
- [16:27]
C
The organization I run is called the center for Election Innovation and Research, C I R for short. We're@electioninnovation.org if anyone wants to check it out. We're a nonpartisan nonprofit and we work with election officials all over the country. Republicans, Democrats, red states, blue states, helping them with their really important work. Kind of the culmination of my nearly 30 years in this field. I've worked for the DOJ in the voting section and worked in elections my whole career. And we were. I founded CEIR back in the summer of 2016, not really knowing what we were going to be heading into in the next 10 years, but we just celebrated our 10th anniversary and we're as big and as busy as ever, given you know what? I know we're going to talk about the constant slanderous attacks on the public servants who run our elections and our democratic process.
- [17:20]
A
Yeah. I mean, just to get into this, I mean, I was talking with Senator Slotkin And I think she said what I think others are saying and what others are feeling, which is that Trump is really laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the midterms, and that that's what a lot of this is about. But the evidence he presented, you know, it was so paper thin, it almost floated away. You know, it was. There was. There was no there there. It was like it was a Where's the beef? Moment. Yeah, there was no beef. It was all Hamburger Helper.
- [17:50]
C
Yeah. It was supposed to be a bombshell. It ended up being a dud. Right. I mean, this was a. And I, And I heard. I heard some of your conversation with Senator Slotkin. You know, I think one of the things we have to talk. Talk about first with regard to the president, and then I want to, you know, I know we want to get into, like, what he actually presented and.
- [18:07]
A
Yeah.
- [18:08]
C
And what a dud it was. You know, there's no question the president's going to try to undermine the elections. The president is going to try to delegitimize it. It appears. I don't know who's going to win the elections in 2026. That's not my job. I'm not very good at that anyway. But it appears the president's pretty concerned about what's going to happen in the elections, and he's really worried about what the voters might do. And so he continues to try to interfere. Right. He's. He's signed two executive orders. He's had the DOJ try to seize sensitive voter data from the states. He's constantly spreading false rhetoric about the elections. He's trying to pass the Save America Act. But there's a huge, gaping chasm between trying to do something that's unconstitutional and doing it. And he's failed on all of it. All of it's failed. The executive orders are blocked. He's 0 and 15 in the courts on those voter data cases. Oh, and 15. I mean, you can't even. As a former DOJ lawyer, I can't even get my head around that.
- [18:57]
A
It's not good.
- [18:58]
C
The Save America act is not passing. You know, all of this stuff is failing. And so last night was the culmination of that, after 18 months, putting all of the resources of the federal government into finding, turning over every rock and trying to find evidence to support his lies that the 2020 election was stolen. The intelligence community, the FBI, the DOJ, the DHS, after all of that time and resources, they picked this last night as the night to unveil all they found, and it was all stuff we already knew and didn't really lead to any conclusion. The 2020 election was stolen. In fact, the head of his task force last night confirmed they had found no evidence to suggest the 2020 election was stolen.
- [19:42]
A
Right.
- [19:42]
C
I mean, incredible.
- [19:44]
A
Yeah. No, I don't know if you're talking about John Solomon, but, yeah, Solomon is a, you know, right wing columnist. He's been an election denier. He's pumped a lot of this information into the Trump inner circle over the years. And my friend Vaughn Hilliard over at Ms. Dow, White House reporter, he went up to John Solomon after the speech was over in the White House driveway. Very smart of him to do this, and asked, you know, I think the key question, which is what was crystal clear last night, no vote. They were not making any allegations or not presenting any evidence that votes were switched from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in 2020, which is the key here. If we can play that clip. It's incredible because I think even John Solomon admits that was the case.
- [20:24]
C
You acknowledged that there were no votes changed in 2020.
- [20:26]
A
I, I, all I can acknowledge is what the intelligence shows.
- [20:29]
B
Right.
- [20:29]
A
I only know the Intelligence committee has zero evidence that someone has flipped, that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 22 or 24. And you have no, you're able to, we're not, through all the documents, you're able to acknowledge that Venezuela has not
- [20:41]
B
tampered with voting machines in the United States.
- [20:43]
A
No, the intelligence is very clear. They did it on their own machines. Why is it important that they did it on their machines? Their machine protocols are the same as America. Why? Because for a long time they did
- [20:54]
B
exactly the 2020 election. What wasn't.
- [20:57]
A
It's never good when they, when they're pulling him away. Sir, we have to go now. And I love how he says, well, we're still going through the documents. You put all the documents out there and you gave this speech to the nation, but you haven't gone through all the. Anyway, Right.
- [21:09]
C
They picked the timing, right, Jim? I mean, this, no one said you have to hold a national, you know, speech on July 16th talking about it. They set the timing for this and that. I, that was the, that was the interview I was referring to. That's, I'm glad you had the clip up because Vaughn did a great job of getting that out of him. Can I, can I mention this claim about the Venezuelan machine, please?
- [21:28]
A
Yes, yes.
- [21:30]
C
So, you know, there's this general claim that our voting machines are vulnerable. The reality is all technology is vulnerable. You know, the technology we're talking to each other over right now is vulnerable. But voting machines are particularly resilient against any exploitation of vulnerabilities because they're kept under lock and key. They're not connected to the Internet. They are tested before and after elections. And, and most importantly, we have paper ballots in every state except Louisiana, and we audit those paper ballots by hand to compare them to the machine counts to make sure the machines operated properly. Now, he's talking about a machine that has never been used in the United States by a company that doesn't, doesn't sell machines in the United States in a Venezuelan election and the Venezuelan government, you know, theoretically operationalizing some, some vulnerability there. I will tell you what he said later. That the protocols are the same is a ridiculous statement. And anyone who understands technology, and I'm certainly not a technologist by any sense, in any sense of the word, will tell you that if you can hack an iPhone, that doesn't mean you can hack a Google phone. Right? They're both phones. They use completely different platforms. Everyone understands that. And even if they did successfully hack a machine, since they're not connected to the Internet, you can't do it on a wide basis.
- [22:45]
A
Right.
- [22:45]
C
We were discovered in the audience audits because we have those paper ballots. We remember the Georgia ballots, human readable, counted by hand with observers from both campaigns watching. Over 5 million of them counted in five days in November of 2020 during a pandemic confirming the results. We didn't rely on machines for those. It's remarkable how little meat they could put on these bones for this big event that the President teased as a huge deal and ultimately, you know, completely fizzled out.
- [23:18]
A
Right. I mean, and just so people absorb what you're saying, David, if a jurisdiction uses a voting machine, it's not connected to the Internet. There's not a hard line going into that voting machine that some kid in his mom's basement could hack into and say, well, I'm going to move 20,000 votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That is, that is not. That is not a capability that exists. And on top of that, we have paper ballots that are, can be audited and counted by hand. I mean, that's, that's the long and the short.
- [23:51]
C
That's exactly right. Anytime anyone has shown theoretical vulnerabilities in a voting machine, and again, it's technology, all technology has some vulnerabilities. They have been. When someone has been given unfettered access to a machine for some Unlimited amount of time. We hear this all the time. And are these vulnerabilities that exist, are they theoretical? Yes. I mean, it's absolutely true. We should not expect any technology to be invulnerable to attack, but it is, under the conditions we keep these machines with the disconnections to the Internet under the strict lock and key. And even if they were successful, or even if a machine malfunctioned, which would be much more likely than a hack, we would discover it because of those paper ballots. And we know who wins these elections. So for all of this talk, you know, today, right after we're done talking, Secretary Mullen is going to have a press conference to follow up on the speech. And Secretary Mullen is going to make several recommendations. I'm sorry, I might laugh when I'm saying these. He's going to recommend software patches and updates. He's going to recommend human readable paper ballots, and he's going to recommend audits. And when I saw that, I thought to myself, well, finally the federal government has caught up to all of the 50 states we already have that the states are doing this. We, you know, we, we. Every state has human readable paper ballots. Again, without, with the exception of Louisiana, if he wants to talk about Louisiana, that might be useful. Every state has audits already. So what are we talking about here?
- [25:21]
A
Right, right. And, and the Save America act is an attempt by Donald Trump to nationalize, to partially nationalize elections by putting national standards on what states do with their elections. And as you were saying earlier, that's going nowhere.
- [25:36]
C
It's going nowhere. And really importantly, after all of the talk of foreign, you know, alleged foreign interference and influence and the false claims of a cover up where literally you could Google documents that were made public and known to the public and certainly given to the President Back in 2020, the Save America act would do nothing about foreign interference or influence. And in fact, the federal agencies that could have done something about foreign interference and influence, influence, things like the cybersecurity infrastructure and Security agency at the Department of Homeland Security, things like the foreign Malign Influence Task Force and cross agency task forces, that every single one of those were dismantled in the first few months of the second Trump administration, CISA had built up all of this capacity to credit President Trump in his first term with election experts, election cybersecurity experts who were cooperatively in partnership with this states, In February of 2025, the President ordered that entirely dismantled. So I think the real question is if all of the, if you believe all of the things you said last night, Mr. President, was it a huge mistake to dismantle America's capacity, push back on this kind of foreign influence campaign?
- [26:45]
A
Yeah. And the other thing too is, you know, there's been some effort in the last several days to cast doubt upon the elections of Senator John Off Ossoff and Senator Raphael Warnock. And I saw Senator Warnock doing an interview somewhere where he made a very good point. I've heard it made before. And, and perhaps you can expand upon it. And that is, you know, Senator Warnock was saying, well, in Georgia, I was elected as a Democrat while other Republicans were elected on the same ballot in, in several jurisdictions. Are you saying that in those elections that there was, there was fraud for the Democrat but not for the Republican? You know, you know what I mean? At some point this stuff just falls apart. It just doesn't make sense anymore.
- [27:27]
C
I mean, if you just, if you rub a couple of brain cells together, it doesn't take too long to unwind it all. I mean, there's so first of all, you're quite right. Earlier in the week, they were sending, as they were trying to figure out like what garbage to throw against the wall, hoping it'll stick, they sent up a couple trial balloons. And one of those trial balloons was the president's going to say that the two Georgia senators are illegitimate. And we did not hear that last night. It clearly that, clearly that fell flat. Right. That trial balloon and Senator Warnock's exactly right. It's one of the points I've made as well. Let's say the president's right that the Chinese were heavily influenced, influencing the 2020 election under his watch when he was president and was charged with responsibility of protecting it. And then the Biden administration, which, you know, he alleges covered this up. That's false. Was overseeing the 2022 and 2024 elections. Why should we trust the results of those two elections where honestly, the president and his party did very, very well? I mean, this is, all of this falls apart. We have one instance, one election where we know a foreign adversary actually tried to interfere with, with election infrastructure, and that's the 2016 election. We know Russia attempted to do that. We know Russia did gain access to a state's voter registration database. Illinois, they had did it for about three, three, three weeks. They, they did it. At the end of that three weeks, they accessed so many documents that Illinois election officials tell me there was no way they couldn't have been noticed. And they were noticed immediately. And the access was shut down immediately. And what the intelligence community has said and what I believe to be true is that Russia knew that it couldn't actually change the election from doing that. But they wanted to plant the seed of doubt in Americans. They wanted to be caught. They wanted Americans to know they were inside election infrastructure. And by the way, this isn't just me saying this. This is the, this is the Senate Intelligence Committee, both parties, a joint report that came out in 2018, signed by people like then Senator Rubio, right?
- [29:24]
A
That's right. And in the document dump that they put out last night, there were documents as part of an intelligence assessment that said Russia was trying to influence the 2020 election against Joe Biden. That they were trying. Yeah, we assessed that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate Joe Biden and what it sees as an anti Russian establishment. And then there was another page that just had a bunch of redactions and it looked like the Epstein files. Except it's not the files, it's the Russia files as part of these election doc. And that was on the White House website. I went in there, I saw it on the Internet last night. I was like, surely this can't be the case. I went on the White House website and I found it about two seconds.
- [30:06]
C
Do a search in the transcript for the word Russia last night. It's not in there. I mean, you never mentioned Russia. The intelligence community did release an assessment. There was a declassified assessment that came out in March of 2021 when President Biden was then in power. But it was a declassified version of a classified intelligence community assessment that was given to President Trump on of all dates January 7, 2021 in the Presidential daily briefing. And in that assessment they, the intelligence community identifies three foreign adversaries. China, Russia and Iran. All working with their from the perspective of their, their unique foreign policy considerations. The intelligence community concluded that Russia was Russia try, it was trying to influence on behalf of Trump. China was likely trying to influence influence against, against Trump. And Iran was more generalized, looking to sow chaos and discord in, in our country.
- [31:04]
A
And, but influence means putting stuff out on social media, putting up dummy accounts on social media sites to amplify, you know, things that, you know, might help one side or the other or so discord or those kinds of things.
- [31:20]
C
That's exactly right. These are the influence campaigns are generally disinformation, social media oriented. We, we expect these, we know these are happening. Unfortunately, we have domestic actors often echoing some of the same claims. I want to be clear, this is not just one side of the aisle. This happens on both sides. Both partisans on both sides kind of find themselves victims to this. There's a famous incident in 2020 during COVID when we're all dealing with the isolation of that and Black Lives Matter, where Russians were putting. Putting out social media, advertising rallies for both Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter at the same time in the same place in Houston, trying, hoping there would be violence and a disruption there. And so we all have to be really aware of those disinformation campaigns. But that's a far cry from hacking into voting machines and altering outcomes of elections, which, even, as we heard from John Solomon, there's zero evidence of, after six years of lies, after 18 months of them controlling the entire federal government.
- [32:26]
A
Right. And it's such a great point that you made earlier. In 2016, the Democrats were in charge. They had the White House. Donald Trump won. In 2020, Donald Trump was in charge. He was in the White House. He lost to Joe Biden. In 2024, the Democrats are back in charge. Donald Trump wins the presidential election. I mean, shouldn't.
- [32:48]
C
Should give us so much confidence. Right? I mean, it kind of shows you no one has their thumb on that. I think I said this at the event that you were at, Jim. You know, at the core of all of these conspiracy theories, when you actually think about it, they want us to focus on Venezuelan voting machines or, you know, voter data in China or something like that. But at the core is the idea that President Trump and his controlled the entire federal government in 2020. And somehow the Democrats who were out of power managed the greatest conspiracy in history to steal the election. And then four years later, when those same Democrats were in power and controlled the vast federal apparatus, they forgot to do it again. I mean, how ridiculous is that? And what a slander. Again, you know, the people I work with, the election officials, I mean, they are doing their work every day. You heard the president last night slander California election officials again. He said that they were still counting ballots last week and how ridiculous that was. And I thought to myself, does he really believe that? Has someone told him that they certified the election last week? That always happens. The certification happens weeks after the election because you count and recount and audit and reconcile everything and make sure everything is right before you give legal effect to the election. Every state does that weeks after the election. California wasn't counting ballots last week. It counted. Finished counting ballots weeks ago. We knew who won. This. I. You know, this is. This is something that really struck me. The, we've known for some time the President has no understanding of how elections are actually run in the United States and apparently no curiosity about it. But what struck me was how people who work for the President at very high levels in the intelligence community and elsewhere also have no conception of how elections are run for, for the administration. John, I heard John Solomon say this last night, for China to have public voter data on Americans, which, I mean, honestly, we've always known they had it, we've always assumed they had it. It's, you know, they're using the highly sophisticated intelligence gathering tool of Google to get this. And to say that if you have that information, you can alter or change or delete voter records or vote on someone's behalf, that's just remarkably ignorant. That is completely false. You know, I could have, I could have a list of all of the students at my kids school, but that doesn't mean I can go inside and go in and change the grades.
- [35:12]
A
Right?
- [35:13]
C
I mean, this is, this is ridiculous. And, and for we should be troubled as, as Americans to think that those who are at the highest level of government and often Senate, confront firm positions, are highlighting an issue like an election integrity without any actual knowledge, with laughable beliefs about how that those processes work when it's very easy, they could just go talk to an election official.
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, and, and you know, I, I think that to some extent, you know, he has a dramatic misunderstanding of how this works. But I think he's also just a cheater at heart. And you know, he cheats at golf, he cheats at everything. He, you know, he pumps up crypto stuff and then his people buy it. And you know, this has been, this has been Trump's grift for the last, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 years of his life. I mean, this is who he is. It's the people around him who won't tell him to knock it off. And he had people like that during the first administration. He had Mike Pence say, I will not help you overturn the election. And I, you know, I was putting this in my video last night. Donald Trump is the one in 2020 who tried to press Brad Raffensper, the Georgia Secretary of State, to find him the exact number of votes that he needed to overturn the results in that state. It's on audio, it has been captured. And you know, to me, the election fraudster that is out there is the man who gave the speech last night. He is the one who attempted to overturn an election in this country. I mean that's just a fact.
- [36:47]
C
You, you, you hit the nail on the head back in 2020 in the first administration. You think about the many people who were people of principal, who were patriots. It wasn't just Mike Pence, but there were people in the White House counsel's office that we know about now. There were people in the Department of Justice, Bill Barr, there were people in the Department of Defense, there are people in the Department of Homeland Security that once the president crossed lines, they said no sir, you can't cross this line line. We are not going to let you cross this line and stop some of the worst things that that could have happened. Which is, you know, all credit to them there. There's no grownup in this administration willing to do that, willing to stand up and tell the President no. And part of the reason is you mentioned grifters and I think this is a really important part point. There's a huge economy of grift that has grown around election conspiracy theories series. There are people whose entire livelihoods are built around continuing to lie to supporters of losing candidates and tell them they didn't, those candidates didn't actually lose the election was stolen. And by the way, donate here and we've just got to keep pushing back against these folks. It is, I have nothing but sympathy for the supporters of losing candidates, even whether I like that candidate or not. We've all experienced disappointment from elections. That's normal. It is not okay to have those people targeted for an ongoing grift. And this was, this speech was last, last night was part of it. Because it's always, oh don't worry, tomorrow we're going to show you the evidence. Right, right. Tomorrow we're going to show you the evidence of fraud. It's never today, it's never, we're going to show it in court but it's always the next day. And finally, you know, they had set it up so that last night was supposed to be that day.
- [38:29]
A
Yeah.
- [38:30]
C
And like the, you know, the grifter pastor who says the world is going to end on a certain day date and everyone wake up, wakes up the next day, we're going to hear probably, oh actually the evidence is going to come back, come up later.
- [38:42]
A
Yeah, no, it tasted like a day old Trump steak. That's, that's for sure. But David Becker, thank you so much. I really appreciate the expertise in laying all this stuff out. I, I wanted to have you on because I just think it's important for people to hear this line by line, as best as we can, how to debunk this stuff, because people need to be armed with this information. When they're at the family barbecue with Aunt Edna and she starts saying what she heard on Fox and that kind of thing, you know, people need to have that information to say, well, but wait a minute, you know, and so it's so great what you do, David. So thank you.
- [39:14]
C
I appreciate that so much, Jim. It's great to be with you today.
- [39:17]
A
All right, good to see you. Thanks so much. And you know, it's so true. You know, the Democrats are in charge in 2016. Donald Trump wins the presidential election. He only won the Electoral College, by the way. Donald Trump's in charge in 2020. Joe Biden wins presidential election. Joe Biden's in charge in 2024. Donald Trump wins presidential election. That right there should, I mean, that, that just kind of blows away this whole, you know, line of bullshit that Donald Trump cannot get off of. And I will tell you, and I was there at the White House on January 6th. I was, I was there during that whole period between the 2020 election and, and when he left office, I was on Air Force One with him when he was leaving the nation's capital in disgrace and so on. And I remember seeing the goofballs like Mike Lindell going in and out of the White House. I remember it was during that time when Marjorie Taylor Greene was at some meeting in, I think it was December of 2020, where they were all talking about how this thing has been stolen from Donald Trump and all this stuff. I remember seeing the Rudy Giuliani's of the world going in and out of the White House. And there was, I mean, we just have to understand that there was an entire plot, there was an entire scheme that took place during the 2020 interregnum between the election of 2020 and January 6, where Donald Trump and the people, many of the people around him, many of his associates, people like Rudy Giuliani, attempted to overturn a free and fair election. That is what they did. That is why Donald Trump was busted, caught on audio calling the Georgia Secretary of State saying, I need to find the votes, one more vote than I needed to win the Georgia election. And, you know, he was caught red handed. And then January 6th happens. He's. He's tweeting, you know, be there on January 6th. It will be wild. There's an entire insurrection that takes place at the Capitol. People die, cops are beaten. The. The Capitol is desecrated. People are wiping Their feces all over the, the capital of the United States, the U.S. capitol. And all of this took place. And I, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, all of it took place. Donald Trump is solely responsible for what took place on January 6th. Had he just taken his loss like a man, had he just accepted it like a man, none of that would have ever happened. And I covered, I've covered concession speeches. I was with mitt Romney in 2012 in Boston the night that he graciously conceded defeat to Barack Obama. That is what you do as an American in this country. And Donald Trump never did that. He never did that in 2020. He refused to go to Joe Biden's inauguration. When Jimmy Carter lost. Jimmy Carter went to Ronald Reagan's inauguration, but George H.W. bush went to Bill Clinton's inauguration. Donald Trump disgracefully did not go to Joe Biden's inauguration. I was there at Joint Base Andrews on, on January 20th of 2021 when he left in disgrace. They had to concoct an entire exit ceremony for Donald Trump because he was acting like a baby and would not go to the inauguration of Joe Biden. That is who he is. He is a man, child. He is a grown ass man who acts like a little baby. And what we saw last night in this election speech over at the White House was yet again Donald Trump acting like a child who cannot accept that he lost an election. And he is still in the process of trying to convince the American people of something they will never be convinced of because he is full of shit. And the things that he says are full of shit. He talks about China intervening and throwing the election to Joe Biden. It's horseshit. No evidence of any votes being switched from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. No evidence was presented. None of it. And Donald Trump, by the way, we should note time and again praises Xi Jinping. He praises the leader of China. He practically licks his ass every single day. Every time he's around Xi Jinping, he kisses his ass. And so you just have to understand how full of this speech was last night. And yet Donald Trump gives, puts out this true social post. This was, this was a, this was a, I think this was this morning or last night. Great reviews on speech last night. Big audience. Pass the Save America Act. Thank you President Donald J. Trump. He posted at 6:52 this morning and you know he, he's not playing with a full deck, ladies and gentlemen. I put it on social media, put it on X last night. I put out the, the link to the 25th Amendment, to the Constitution. I saw Gavin Newsom posting about this. We are in a 25th Amendment moment in this country. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork. He is laying the kindling for stealing the, the November midterms. And he is so determined to do this kind of, that he is threatening the networks if they do not go along with his monkey business. And you know, last night he was saying that he's going to go after the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC. I mean he's. NBC and ABC Fake News have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don't like the topic because they know how corrupt our system is and they don't want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason, they want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can't have a great country and that's true. You can't have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this, it's horseshit. It's all horseshitation of their license. He goes after the networks and claims that the networks are out to get him and part of some plot and so on. He's making these threats that he's going to go after an arrest journalists and go after people in this country and it's absolute total. And you know, one of the things that he should be looking at is the little, the little thing that they had to say on Fox last night because remember, Fox carried this live. They carried the whole friggin thing live. And they got into the voting machines. Donald Trump got into his crazy conspiracy theories about the voting machines again and Fox had this, the sued out of them to the tune of $787 million they had to pay us, pay a settlement to Dominion Voting Systems because they were part of this, you know, crazy cockamamie stuff that was being thrown out there in 2020. So they paid almost a billion dollars to Dominion. And, and then Fox is having to say after the speech that oh, by the way, this stuff hasn't been vetted. This stuff is.
- [46:21]
B
Sean, you also heard the President make claims that electronic voting machines are vulnerable and easily compromised.
- [46:28]
A
FOX News has not seen that evidence yet, is not in a position to
- [46:32]
B
evaluate the accuracy of the President's statements and claims.
- [46:38]
A
So Fox, Fox has to run a disclaimer after Donald Trump's speech because they aired Donald Trump's speech live. This is why I was saying before Donald Trump got up in front of the camera and, and delivered that crazy speech last night that the network should not carry the speech. Fox, you should have listened to me. Fox, you blew it. Once again, you blew it. And I don't know, does Dominion get another billion dollars out of this? I don't know how that works, but, you know, Fox had a choice. And Fox chose to be state television for Donald Trump. They will always choose to be state television for Donald Trump. Sean Hannity was the anchor during the covers last night, and Sean Hannity was texting with Mark Meadows on January 6th saying that Donald Trump needs to knock it off. Sean Hannity was doing that. That was presented as part of the January 6 committee unveiling of evidence. And Fox aired the speech last night and then had to run a goddamn disclaimer because even they know that Donald Trump is full of shit. And so I, you know, I, I was asking Senator Slotkin, did you sleep better or sleep worse last night? In a way, you sleep worse. Because he is going to try some shit this fall. There's no question about. People need to be prepared for it. Election officials across the country need to be prepared for it. We in the media need to be prepared for it. The networks need to be extremely cautious about putting anything that he says on national television. But at the same time, I almost slept a little better last night because he is. Donald Trump is so incompetent and stupid about this stuff that he can't persuade anybody of anything. It's sort of like when he cheats at golf and everybody knows he's cheating and he gets caught cheating and nobody will believe his golf score. Why would anybody believe his golf score? We all know that he cheats at golf. It's the same with the elections. These, these conspiracy theories are so stupid and convoluted and don't make any sense and are full of holes and don't add up that we already know the score. We already know that Donald Trump's going to try to cheat in the November election. So in this, in a sense, he did us all a favor. We have now been armed with this information. Let the record be clear. Let, let everybody see what is happening. That the emperor has no clothes when it comes to this stuff. It is absolutely, crystal clear that Donald Trump will try to cheat in the November elections. And it's now up to all of us to put a stop to it once and for all. My thanks to Senator Alyssa Slotkin. My thanks to David Becker, my thanks to all of you for tuning in each and every week. Really appreciate that. For those of you who support this program by liking and sharing and subscribing, thank you so much for all of the support, support that you give us each and every day. Don't forget, we've got a brand new newsletter that's out. It's on substack and YouTube. It is a terrific daily morning newsletter, gives you all the politics of the day, delivered, of course, with that cheeky style that we prefer here on the show. So make sure you check that out as well. But want to thank everybody for all the support that you give us each and every day. Uh, still reporting from Washington, I'm Jim Acosta. Have a great weekend. I'll see you next time. Sa.